On fatigued fogeys
Jan. 26th, 2016 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreadedcandiru2The interesting thing about the Middle Years is having to remember exactly why it is that Mike is thought of as having a bad attitude that isn't simply his not wanting to get away from a house he's starting to regard as a maximum security prison run by a cruel warden who spends her days thinking up new ways to torment the children she only had in the first place to have people to be mean to because she's incapable of kindness and happiness. While I like to dream about what would have happened if he realized that there was a whiny infant weeping about how awful she felt about having to make decisions and be the heavy inside the implacable loudmouth, the fact is that he never learns about her and he never learns what he did to piss his mother off.
This is something of a shame because it keeps him from figuring out how to avoid getting himself into trouble. While he does know that for some reason, his mother overreacts horribly to his not immediately and cravenly agreeing to do her bidding, what he doesn't get is that when she's got a stupid idea that hurts her in her head, she'd rather die than dislodge it and be happy because of her need to be taken seriously. This is why his cruel, hateful and hurtful comments about how her baffling habit of acting as if her life is all used up and gone at the horrible age of forty is as absurd and self-destructive as her belief that she's somehow morbidly obese and thus unworthy of love and fellowship are not taken well. Elly has no real interest in being reassured because she wants her crazy self-destructive delusions taken with as much pointless seriousness as she takes them. Admitting that she's still young, presentable and slim means that she's wasted her life feeling sorry for herself over lies and that would make her a fool who isn't worth being taken seriously and that's bad. Eventually, though, he learns to shut up and agree with whatever mush she speaks because he knows it ain't worth it to make her see the truth because she's always going to prefer a melodramatic lie that confirms her self-hatred than the truth.
This is something of a shame because it keeps him from figuring out how to avoid getting himself into trouble. While he does know that for some reason, his mother overreacts horribly to his not immediately and cravenly agreeing to do her bidding, what he doesn't get is that when she's got a stupid idea that hurts her in her head, she'd rather die than dislodge it and be happy because of her need to be taken seriously. This is why his cruel, hateful and hurtful comments about how her baffling habit of acting as if her life is all used up and gone at the horrible age of forty is as absurd and self-destructive as her belief that she's somehow morbidly obese and thus unworthy of love and fellowship are not taken well. Elly has no real interest in being reassured because she wants her crazy self-destructive delusions taken with as much pointless seriousness as she takes them. Admitting that she's still young, presentable and slim means that she's wasted her life feeling sorry for herself over lies and that would make her a fool who isn't worth being taken seriously and that's bad. Eventually, though, he learns to shut up and agree with whatever mush she speaks because he knows it ain't worth it to make her see the truth because she's always going to prefer a melodramatic lie that confirms her self-hatred than the truth.
